Etienne wasn’t the only one to have been changed by love’s magic. One day I noticed that our maths teacher wasn’t limping any more. She was walking perfectly normally, even confidently. The weight of her baby must have left her for good and her life surely felt lighter again. Sometimes in lessons she had a dreamy look on her face and a vague smile. She was clearly finding it difficult to concentrate and would rather have been talking to us about something other than cosines, tangents and proportions. In the glorious month of June, it’s impossible to work up any interest in maths. I was sure she’d met someone with whom she could … well, you know … and that’s far more interesting than all those stacks of numbers, even for specialists. These days she wore skirts, which showed a sort of flirtatious friskiness, and glittery earrings that hypnotized me during lessons. In fact I even began to think quite highly of her. Not to the same extent as Marie, Haisam or Dad, but quite highly all the same.

I was sure now that Marie and I would make it to the audition. Since the concert, everything had become much easier, because there was no longer any reason for suspicion. Everyone had thought that Marie was following the score closely, although actually she knew the music by heart. We’d agreed on a sign so that I would know the right moment to turn the page. I’d had to practise, because it’s not all that easy to turn pages in the correct way. Even in life it can be really hard to turn the page. Dad had explained that turning the page was a figure of speech for learning to forget and put to one side any painful parts of one’s life. I could see that this was a sort of invitation.

“And about our old life with Mum, did you manage to turn the page, Dad?”

But he wasn’t a great one for sharing confidences and he often took refuge behind the huge old Panhard. He wanted to put me off the scent by talking about the manufacture of Panhard PL17s in Uruguay, reeling off a ridiculous list of chassis numbers.

“The page, Dad, did you manage to turn it?”

He took a deep breath.

“Yes, but it wasn’t a comic book, I can tell you!”

I could see he wasn’t sure I’d get what he meant, but I nodded gravely to show that I was used to parables and understood his feelings.

“But still we’re happy, Dad, the two of us, aren’t we?”

“Of course we’re happy!” he said, slapping me on the back to encourage me.